When we look down from the lofty elevation of the nineteenth century, which is called the age of progress, into this deep gulf of the middle ages—the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries—we are not astonished at its darkness, but by the brilliant rays that issue from it. It is not an abyss. At the first glance there seem to be only a few points of light; but the eye is soon attracted by a multitude of peaks everywhere rising up with brilliant summits and resplendent glaciers sparkling with radiant light. We are astonished and give ourselves up to admiration, in the words of the poet who, perceiving the Alps afar off, thinks that
"Ces monts glacés
Ne sont qu'affreux déserts, rochers, torrents, abîmes,"
but who, when he reaches them,
"Y trouve, ravi,
De l'ombre, des rayons, des solitudes vertes,
Des vergers pleins de dons, des chaumières ouvertes
A l'hospitalité. …
Des coteaux aux flancs d'or, de limpides vallées,
Et des lacs étoilés des feux du firmament" [Footnote 227]
—finds the hospitality of the church, the solitude of monasteries, and the firmament of Christianity!
[Footnote 227: Lamartine.]
III.
Intercourse Of Nations.
Doubt is still displayed. There are other objections. Noblemen did not know how to read, women lived in ignorance; how could knowledge be diffused when people within fortified walls and the narrow limits of their territories could with so much difficulty hold communication with each other?
There is a false idea of the middle ages. It is imagined that men, so independent and so wilful, remained stationary and shut up in their fortresses without endeavoring to see and know each other. It is precisely the contrary. There was a constant and ardent desire for intercourse which caused nations to mingle and exchange languages, ideas, and customs. What was the consequence of the incessant wars, if not to lead men of the North to the South, those of the East to the West, the people of Normandy to Naples and to England, the Britons of Armorica into Great Britain, and vice versa, (from the fifth to the eleventh century;) [Footnote 228] the Burgundians into Lusitania, where they founded the kingdom of Portugal, (Henry of Burgundy, in the eleventh century, accompanied by knights and troubadours)? And then the varied and extensive commerce of the great cities of France and of the rich and industrious Flemish cities, whose ports, filled with vessels from every land, resounded, as we are told by the chroniclers, with the sounds of all languages? And the celebrated fairs, Beaucaire, Novgorod, and the Landit, (at St. Denis,) rallying-points for the merchants of Europe, Egypt, Asia, and the islands of the Levant—and which were the universal expositions of the productions of the middle ages? The bold enterprises of the Italian republics, powerful through commerce, which owned vessels enough to transport the entire army of the crusaders, and which owned a part of the East—the Genoese, the faubourgs of Constantinople; the Pisans, several ports in Syria; the Venetians, the Morea and Crete, the Archipelago; which trafficked not only with the rest of Europe, but with the coast of Barbary, Tunis, and Morocco, [Footnote 229] in fact, with the interior of Asia, into which its adventurous citizens penetrated, (as in the case of Marco Polo and several others,) and with the extreme East, which the nineteenth century has only just discovered, if we may dare say so, and allied with the rest of the world. [Footnote 230]
[Footnote 228: La Villemarqué, Discours au Congrès celtigue de Saint-Brieuc, 1867.]